Sanders reaches 4 million donations, thanks in part to automatic monthly giving

[Hassin Bin Sober]

Sanders reaches 4 million donations, thanks in part to automatic monthly giving


https://www.thetelegraph.com/news/article/Sanders-reaches-4-million-donations-thanks-in-14849258.php

About one-quarter of donations that have so far flowed to the Sanders campaign came from online supporters signed up to automatically give money monthly, officials said. More than 175,000 people have signed up to donate a set amount each month, similar to a monthly subscription service.
Candidates are increasingly using this subscription model to cultivate a low-dollar donor base. They bring a measure of predictability to online donations, which tend to be driven by buzz around a viral moment or a big marketing push.

[TexasTowelie]

1. IOW, there are significantly less than 4 million people donating to Bernie.

Thanks for the clarification.

[highplainsdem]

2. Politico: How Bernie's Small Donors Are Making Credit Card Companies Rich

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/11/25/small-dollar-online-donors-politics-credit-card-processing-072949

When you give a dollar to a political campaign using your credit card, a portion of that money is paid to a range of companies—the bank that issues a donor’s credit card, the campaign’s bank, the credit card company, etc.—and is generally taken as a percentage of the donation, plus a fixed amount per transaction. Even ActBlue, which advertises a flat fee of 3.95 percent, gets charged a per-transaction fee behind the scenes, though the organization would not give exact amounts.

And as contributors make smaller but more frequent contributions, those per-transaction costs have a disproportionate impact.

To illustrate the point, Zucker gave a commercially reasonable rate—similar to Stripe's or PayPal’s—of 3 percent plus 30 cents per transaction. Imagine a single donor makes a $1,000 contribution to a candidate under that scenario: The campaign would get $969.70, and the processing middlemen (Visa, Wells Fargo, and so on) would take $30.30. But that balance changes radically if the campaign has a thousand different supporters make tiny online donations of a $1 apiece. In that case, the existence of per-transaction fees means the credit card processors would take $330, while campaign would get only $670 — even as it would be able to tout a low average donation size.

Over time, the proportion of online donations that goes to processing fees has gone up. In the 2008 cycle, an average of about 1.3 cents from every dollar donated online to campaigns went to credit card processors. So far in the 2020 cycle, that rate is roughly 3 cents per online dollar.

[JoeOtterbein]

3. Are you sure you want to bring up credit cards?

House of Cards
How Joe Biden helped build a financial system that’s great for Delaware banks and terrible for the rest of us.
TIM MURPHY NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 ISSUE

[link:https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/11/biden-bankruptcy-president/|

In early 1973, as Joe Biden was settling into his new job in Washington, DC, Ralph Nader published a deconstruction of what made the freshman Democratic senator’s state of Delaware, the most anodyne of states, so exceptional. The answer, The Company State explained, had to do with the unique relationship between government and commerce: Delaware was less a democracy than a fiefdom, contorting its laws to meet the demands of its corporate lords.

Preeminent among them was the chemical giant DuPont. Nader took readers to Rodney Square, in the heart of Wilmington. There was the ritzy Hotel du Pont, housed in a building owned by DuPont, next to a theater built by DuPont, connected to a bank controlled by the du Pont family, surrounded by law offices and brokerages—all affiliated in some way with what was known simply as “The Company.” The du Ponts owned the state’s two largest newspapers and employed a tenth of the state legislature. The governor was a former executive. The state’s member of Congress for most of the 1970s was Pierre Samuel du Pont IV.

snip

more at link

[George II]

4. FYI:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1287364231

[brooklynite]

5. Now, if only he could find voters...

December 2015 poll: Sanders 30%
December 2019 poll: Sanders 15%

[Tiggeroshii]

6. 2016: 13 million voters.

Last edited Mon Dec 2, 2019, 06:56 AM - Edit history (1)

So far exponentially more than any other candidate running right now has ever received for president.

[LanternWaste]

7. This is troubling for Bernie.